I do disagree with some big statements the author makes, but here's another critique of Cameroon's moronic statement:-
Islamabad's storm clouds
Cameron can't blunder on Pakistan. Its troubles and role in terror make Afghanistan a sideshow
Peter Preston
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 August 2010 23.00 BST
Baron Prescott, one supposes, would call it a tower of tittle-tattle.
If you don't believe dodgy dossiers on Iraq, then why get excited about tall tales that tie Pakistani military intelligence to Taliban terror? This was one WikiLeaks strand that nobody repeated with full confidence. Who were these secondhand sources slipping Nato bizarre allegations? Maybe freelance storytellers, maybe Afghanistan's own intelligence officers. Maybe Chinese/Iranian/Indian secret agents. Welcome to a cesspit of cynicism and calculation.
Why did David Cameron wade right in on Indian soil? Imagine Barack Obama going to Buenos Aires and making a speech about Britain's Falklands imperialism. Place and message together matter. So, frankly, does straight-dealing. The WikiLeaks allegations go back years: a random bundle of Nato documents Washington and Whitehall have long had access to. Nothing happened last week that made any difference, or required an instant response.
But new prime ministers with new dilemmas to address are allowed to stumble, to fail to realise that the problem here doesn't lie in Kabul or the Hindu Kush. Afghanistan is a sideshow. Pakistan, a nuclear state with a population seven times bigger than its troublesome neighbour, is the main event.
Where (with help from the CIA) were the original Taliban recruited, trained? Where are the masters of 9/11 still hiding? Where did virtually every bomb plotter of the last nine years do his ignition course? Which country is still fighting a desperate battle to keep its own fundamentalists at bay? Which country has seen more of its troops die in the "war against terror" than Nato? And its citizens slaughtered in huge bomb blasts? Which country, if it became a failed state, would be the biggest disaster of the lot? Pakistan ticks every box.
The devil lies in putting too much stress on fine, malevolent detail. Look at the frailties of the CIA or MI6.
Why, in the chaos of Pakistan, assume that a Bond-like Inter-Services Intelligence controls every lever? It's a convenient copout, not a true cause of failure.
The ISI is only one part of Pakistan's crisis. Its bosses aren't coming to London. Its constitutional leader, the democratically elected President Zardari, is turning up. But he can't tell the army what to do. Not that the generals, losing men in badland frontier wars, know. Public opinion needs someone to blame. Western interference is there for a demo kicking. And factor in terror strikes, incompetence, corruption.
Lecturing from the White House or Downing Street serves no purpose. Nor does the assumption that "something can be done" when, on the ground, it can't. But at least, as the war of words swells, we might get focus clear.
Winning a town or a village in Helmand now doesn't matter. Nor, three or four years on, does propping up Karzai in Kabul. If we want to clamp down on terror training keeping "our cities safe" then Pakistan is the heart of the action.
It can't be military action. That is absurd. It can be aid in action. But diplomatic action, for once, matters most of all. And it must begin at square one.
Kashmir? The reason why Pakistan's military stays so strong, so funded, so bent on matching India's every move. The reason why Pakistan democracy has proved so frail. The reason why Islamabad dabbles in Afghanistan's shifting alliances. Begin to broker a final Indo-Pakistani peace, try to set stable relations at the core of the subcontinent, and everything else begins to follow.
Not easy. Not sweet talk on a trade visit to Delhi. But if you don't know where to start, then you'll never finish.
Islamabad's storm clouds | Peter Preston | Comment is free | The Guardian
